Samuel Karlin

Samuel Karlin was born in Yanova* and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life.

There are also 35 villages in Poland which carry that name. Es ist der polnischer Name einer Siedlung städtischen Typs in der Ukraine, siehe Iwano-Frankowe

Samuel Karlin earned his undergraduate degree from Illinois Institute of Technology; and then his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1947 (at the age of 22) under the supervision of Salomon Bochner. Samuel Karlin was on the faculty of Caltech from 1948–56, before becoming a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford.

Throughout his career, Samuel Karlin made fundamental contributions to the fields of mathematical economics, bioinformatics, game theory, evolutionary theory, biomolecular sequence analysis, and total positivity. Samuel Karlin did extensive work in mathematical population genetics. In the early 1990s, Samuel Karlin and Stephen Altschul developed the Karlin-Altschul statistics, a basis for the highly used sequence similarity software program BLAST.